Money's Conversations

When I offer MadHOURS to vendors, people often think
it's a joke. After I assure them that I didn't rip the bills off of a
board game or print them myself—that these bills are, in fact, accepted
for trade—their incredulity weakens. If they look at the bills, which
have a certain beauty and authenticity about them, a conversation
usually begins: “What do people do with this money?” Well, I buy
coffee at Mother Fool's and food at the Willy St. Co-op. I've bought
custom sewing, a felt hat, a printer for my computer, and garden
seedlings with MadHOURS. My kids bought a unicycle with their own
hard-earned MadHOURS. You could also hire a cook, a naturalist, rent a
truck, take French lessons, hire a pet-sitter, have custom furniture
built, or get your toaster repaired, among a variety of things and
services.

MadHOURS, like its prototype Ithaca Hours,
was initiated in 1996 to combat low wages and unemployment, and to spur
sustainable, grassroots economic development in the Madison, Wisconsin
area.

In the five years HOURS have circulated,
they have connected people as neighbors and members of a common
regional community. In my own experience, HOURS foster valuable
conversations about the nature of money.

As people
begin to accept this money as an economic instrument in the community,
certain preconceptions about money unfold. It was apparent, for
example, that though people find it easy to talk about what money does,
they often can't find a satisfactory definition of what money is. Given
that most people save money (when they can) as insurance against an
uncertain future, a sobering consensus emerged: Money is a measure of
our distrust, of our failure to commit ourselves to what is good about
human nature.

People I spoke with also began to
see through the myth that money is a neutral medium of exchange.
“Federal dollars,” as Paul Glover, the founder of Ithaca Hours,
explains, “come to town, shake a few hands, then leave to buy
rainforest lumber and fight wars.” While dollars make us increasingly
dependent on transnational corporations and bankers, local currencies
stay in a region to help people hire each other, reinforce community
trading, and expand commerce that is more accountable to concerns for
ecology and social justice.

Local currencies
create conditions where people re-evaluate the costs of money. In their
capacity to decentralize control and create participatory processes,
local currencies can be powerful pivots for social change. The
multiplication of these alternative economies threatens the interests
of the corporate elite by preparing revolution in the minds and
behaviors of people.

Participation in these
economic alternatives is a form of direct action against monopoly
capitalism. It is nonviolent, and therefore its methods are compatible
with its goal.

With sufficient evidence of working
alternatives, more people may begin to wonder why human activities that
used to be done naturally have been rendered scarce and commodified;
why activities like learning, dwelling, walking, and healing, under the
rubrics of “education,” “housing,” “transportation,” and “healthcare,”
have been turned into commodities and services that must be purchased.
With more evidence of working alternatives, people begin to understand
that the modern market economy takes what is best about humanity—care,
neighborliness, kindness, community—and corrupts it by attaching a
price.

Even though we have been socialized by a
competitive and selfish culture and become accustomed to certain
arrangements of social life, it is always possible to refuse
destructive practices and to make steadfast commitments to
relationships that presume fairness and goodwill, rather than
self-interest and exploitation. Like the thousands of other local
currency initiatives in the world,

MadHOURS is a practical and immediate strategy for this kind of change. For information on MadHOURS, visit www.madisonhours.org or call 608/259-9050. Camy Mathay is a writer and mother who lives in Brooklyn, Wisconsin.